All-Night Event Part of National Hunger & Homelessness Awareness Week

Bethlehem, Pa, November 16, 2015- More than 100 Moravian College students will spend the night of Tuesday, November 17 sleeping on the sidewalk in cardboard boxes to raise awareness for National Hunger & Homelessness Awareness Week. The "SleepOut" is part of a week-long program at the College that includes a film night, a service project, and a hunger meal in which the individual student's food is selected by chance.

The week begins with a movie Storied Streets on Mondayevening at 6:00 p.m. The documentary explores the issue of homelessness in the United States. The film depicts a journey that explores stereotypes of homelessness starting in Los Angeles and ending in New York, covering 13 cities across the country.

A second film, America's Invisible Children: The Homeless Education Crisis in America, will be viewed on Tuesdayevening. There will be discussion following the movie that begins at 8:45 p.m. in the Pavilion of the Haupert Union Building.  After the program, the students will begin their night on the street.

More than 100 students will sleep in cardboard boxes at the 1742 marker near the corner of Monocracy and Locust Streets from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m., the next morning. Students are allowed to wear as many layers as they want, but only get one blanket. They will be given black coffee in the morning, but nothing else. They are not allowed to have any electronics or bring their own food.

The week of events is sponsored by Moravian College's Center for Career and Civic Engagement. "By participating in this initiative, we hope to provide a glimpse into what it feels like to be homeless. And I hope the students are moved to act,” said Gillian Sharkey, director of civic engagement at Moravian College. “I am certainly not expecting the students to understand what it is to be homeless, it would be impossible to replicate the complexity of poverty in one night, but I do hope that the students are moved by their experience.”

National Hunger & Homelessness Awareness Week is held each year the week before Thanksgiving. This is a time for us all to start to think about what we are thankful for, a perfect time to share our compassion with our neighbors who are experiencing homelessness, and work toward a world where no one has to experience Hunger and Homelessness. H&H week offers the chance to contribute to a national social movement. NCH’s aim is and always will be to eradicate homelessness by solving the root causes of it. We aim for activism in this vein. For this year’s H&H week we are focusing on the laws passed by local governments around the nation which prevent people experiencing homelessness from doing life-sustaining activities.

Moravian College is a private coeducational liberal arts college, offering undergraduate and graduate degrees, in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. For over 270 years, the Moravian College degree has been based on a liberal arts curriculum where literature, history, cultural values and global issues, ethics, and aesthetic expression and the social sciences are infused with multidisciplinary perspectives. Visit www.moravian.edu to learn more.